Walk animations, day/night cycle, and UI plans

It's been a while. Devlog time again.

Work continues on the game, but at a slightly slower pace. Most of the things that need to be done right now are the things I have been putting off because they are difficult. The kind of things where you need to sit down with a pen and some paper and sketch out exactly how it's going to work. MyPaint is a good piece of software that has an infinite canvas for sketching things I highly recommend. Anyway some of the things I have gotten done:

I added simple walk animations to the NPCs. I tried a few different animations for walking, but I found the simplest one is the one that fit best. Anything to complicated and the sprite bounced around too much. The sprites are only 16x16 so any pixel of movement is drastic. The answer maybe to double the sprite size in pixels and then use Godot to scale them down. That way I can have twice the detail but keep the same size.

The NPCs also have a direction their sprite can face now. Because of how the NPCs sprite and collision body are setup, getting the direction of the vision cone vs where the body is facing was breaking my brain. I basically just had to tell if the body was facing left, or right and flip the sprite accordingly. These additions make the NPCs seem smarter than they actually are, which is cool. I still need to look into how to use behavior trees if I want the NPCs to do anything more complicated. Right now they just walk from A to B and avoid each other if they get to close.

I reworked the day/night cycle so it works when you are disembarked with the alien. I had to create another mask for the alien and have its transparency change based on the time of day. That way whichever player character is being controlled, it has a spotlight on the character if its night. I want to look into using a shader to control the day/night cycle. I bet it would look better than just a black texture that fades in when its night.

I think the next thing I'm going to be working on is the UI. I think the biggest thing the game is missing is a tutorial. I have thought about making a tutorial area where it forces you to complete some tasks to move on, so you know how to play. I think a better approach is to teach the player as they go. Like the first time you see a NPC some tutorial text pops up and explains how to abduct and scan, and the heat mechanic. The tutorial text would pop up on the console bar and a sound queue would play.

One idea I had was having the Mothership have a voice. It would be its own character and would explain things to the player as they go. It could have a cool robot voice. Making a cool robot voice is fun and doable, but it's a ton of work to create each line of dialogue and then setup when each of them plays. Its one of those things I need to map out before implementing and if the game is still changing, its impossible to do at the moment. Once I have text pop ups and can just have the voice narrate them, and maybe some funny lines to give the game some more story.

I've never really had a problem with motivation to work on the game. The motivation came from how cool it would be once its working, but when getting something working takes months, it's tough. I just got to make smaller goals, and take it step by step. Who knew making games is hard.